[Numpy-discussion] access ndarray in C++

[David Cournapeau]

Matthieu Brucher wrote:
>
>     Having a good python extension builder is also more difficult than I
>     first expected, too (you can't retrieve options for MS compilers from
>     distutils, for example and I would like to support building with and
>     without distutils' help).
>
>
> What are these options that must be retrieved? 

the compiler, the compiler flags, the linker, the linker flags, the 
location of Python.h, etc...

> With a simple extension builder, we didn't encountered any bug 
> although we have a fair number of extensions.

Building a helloworld like extension or say numpy.core is kind of the 
same from a build point of view. The problem really is to work in many 
different configurations (for example supporting building python 
extensions for a different python than the one running scons), on 
different platforms.

Waf (a project which started as a fork of scons and is now a totally 
different project for all purpose) has a python tool, and it is 300 
lines of code:

http://code.google.com/p/waf/source/browse/trunk/wafadmin/Tools/python.py

And it has more support for this kind of things than scons. My current 
work for a python extension for scons is ~ 200 lines, not including unit 
tests.

cheers,

David